Finally, everyone associated with the Hartland wrestling team will tell you, the weekend is here.

Finally, the Eagles get their chance to rid the rotten taste in their mouths that was left lingering from losing the Division 1 team state finals to Brighton, 31-25, last season. Finally, the date they have circled on their calendars since that devastating match ended has come.

On Friday, Hartland will be competing at the D1 state meet at 2 p.m. at Central Michigan University’s McGuirk Arena, and, if it can win two matches, vying for its first championship on Saturday afternoon. These are the two days that many of the wrestlers have worked the past 10-plus years for, to claim a team state championship and bring it back home.

They came so close last year.

They came so close in four straight years between 2004-07.

They’re tired of coming close. Chosen as the No. 1 seed, they want now to be the time.

“Everybody knows that the only difference between the trophies we have in our room and the trophy we want in our room is one word,” Hartland coach Todd Cheney said. “And that’s ‘champion’ instead of ‘runner-up.’ The kids have talked about it the entire year. Last year, when we lost, a couple of kids the next day on their Twitter posted, ‘364 days.’ So it’s been our focus. It’s been everything we’ve talked about the whole year, and we just need to do our best.”

“It drives us every day. That’s the one trophy we don’t have,” junior 140-pounder Reece Hughes added. “Every single day we look up there and we see, ‘runner-up’ and we don’t have a championship trophy, and we’re pretty darn sick of taking second and not winning it.”

"No one likes being the runner-up," said senior captain Logan Vish, putting it in the most blunt terms. "It really, really does suck."

It would certainly be premature to claim that this is the year for the Eagles. But they have certainly looked every bit the contender that they were pegged to be since the beginning of the year, when they were ranked by MichiganGrappler.com as D1’s No. 1 team and ranked nationally as well.

They wrapped up their district without breaking a sweat, and then repeated the feat in regionals, taking down Walled Lake Central, 54-15, and Warren Mott, 72-12, to win their 15th straight regional before the clock struck 7:30 p.m when the tournament started at 6 p.m. Cheney even acknowledged, “we never get done that fast.”

They have compiled a 31-1 record so far this year. They’ve taken down top teams such as Anchor Bay, Richmond, Davison, Lake Fenton, Oxford, Macomb Dakota, Brighton and John Glenn — all of which were and are currently ranked. They tied a record for individual regional qualifiers, getting all 14 of their wrestlers through for the second time in school history (2013). Then, they broke the record for state qualifiers, sending 11 to The Palace of Auburn Hills.

And the only loss they’ve suffered to top-ranked Detroit Catholic Central has served as the perfect motivational tool. They already had plenty of it after the Brighton loss to end 2015, but if the Eagles had thought they were unbeatable given their ranked, Catholic Central knocked them down a peg with a 33-16 victory over Hartland at the same venue they now travel to Friday.

Since then, they’ve taken absolutely nothing for granted.

Since then, they’ve worked harder than ever before all for this moment.

“Definitely,” Hughes said. “Definitely, it gave us a boost all around, because we didn’t have much fire in the pot to push us. Then, after that, it definitely started pushing us and we became closer as a team and more of a family. And that’s what you need to win states, to be family. That whole weekend was a reality check, to be honest.”

“That loss was probably the best thing that could have happened to us the entire year,” Cheney said. “I always tell the kids you learn more from a loss than a win. And that loss gave us a new mindset and told us we needed to work hard. Since then, we’ve been pretty dominant. We’ve won some big dual meets and blown out some good teams.”

Hartland will hope to blow out another one — or, ideally, three — starting Friday.

It begins with the eighth-seeded Temperance Bedford, which is making its first trip to quarterfinals since 2013, when it went one-and-done against Rochester. Bedford advanced this far by beating Saline at regionals, 66-12, and then getting a close 31-28 win vs. John Glenn.

Bedford was ranked 10th in the final season rankings.

Its wrestlers have also found plenty of success at the individual level. The team has nine ranked guys, and is loaded in the back half of the weight classes with one ranked in every class starting at 152 pounds, and two at 215. It qualified five for states last week.

Among them is reigning state champion Blake Montrie, who won the 152-pound title last year and will be going for a repeat at 160 pounds. With two guys ranked at 152 in both senior captain Sage Castillo and Logan Vish, it’s possible one of those two — who are both gunning to be this year’s champ at 152 — will bump up to face Bedford’s best. It’s also possible they could shift down. For strategic purposes, Cheney was keeping that decision a secret.

He would say that much of it depends on the starting weight, which the Eagles won’t find out for sure until a coaches meeting just prior to the 2 p.m. start Friday. The hope and ideal scenario, Cheney said, is that it begins with the lower weights.

“A lot of times momentum is a big deal,” he said. “We’d like to start at a weight that we’re strong at. We’d like to start at a lower weight since I think our lower weights are better, on paper, and if we can get a lead our momentum can just get rolling.”

More likely is that the ideal scenario doesn’t play out. But the Eagles are ready for anything. Having felt the pain of falling short last year, they certainly don’t want to go home with that feeling again. They want this to be the year. No one can argue that they have worked incredibly hard for this to be the year.

They just have to go earn it.

“It would mean everything to be the first team at Hartland to ever win states. That’s something no one can ever take away from you,” Hughes said. “It’s something that so many kids have worked for to have the chance at, but have never done. If we win this, it’s not just for our team. It’s for everyone who didn’t get to do it. It’s for our team, past teams and the entire community.”